Kitabı oku: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 12, No. 324, July 26, 1828», sayfa 2

Here we must end, at least for the present; but there is so much anecdotical pleasantry in Salmonia that we might continue our extracts through many columns, and we are persuaded, to the gratification of the majority of our readers. Even when we announced the publication of this work a few weeks since, we were led to anticipate the delight it would afford many of our esteemed correspondents, especially our friend W.H.H., who has "caught about forty trout in two or three hours" in the rocky basins of Pot-beck, &c.⁵ Sir Humphry Davy mentions the Wandle in Surrey, as we have quoted; but he does not allude to the trout-fishing in the Mole, in the Vale of Leatherhead in the same county. There are in the course of the work a few expressions which make humanity shudder, and would drive a Pythagorean to madness,⁶ notwithstanding the ingenuity with which the author attempts to vindicate his favourite amusement.

SHROPSHIRE AND WELSH GIRLS

There are few Londoners who in their suburban strolls have failed to notice the scores of female fruit-carriers by whose toil the markets are supplied with some of their choicest delicacies. As an interesting illustration of the meritorious character of these handmaids to luxury, I send you the following extract from Sir Richard Phillips's Walk from London to Kew.

PHILO.

In the strawberry season, hundreds of women are employed to carry that delicate fruit to market on their heads; and their industry in performing this task is as wonderful, as their remuneration is unworthy of the opulent classes who derive enjoyment from their labour. They consist, for the most part, of Shropshire and Welsh girls, who walk to London at this season in droves, to perform this drudgery, just as the Irish peasantry come to assist in the hay and corn harvests. I learnt that these women carry upon their heads baskets of strawberries or raspberries, weighing from forty to fifty pounds, and make two turns in the day, from Isleworth to market, a distance of thirteen miles each way; three turns from Brentford, a distance of nine miles; and four turns from Hammersmith, a distance of six miles. For the most part, they find some conveyance back; but even then these industrious creatures carry loads from twenty-four to thirty miles a-day, besides walking back unladen some part of each turn! Their remuneration for this unparalleled slavery is from 8s. to 9s. per day; each turn from the distance of Isleworth being 4s. or 4s. 6d.; and from that of Hammersmith 2s. or 2s. 3d. Their diet is coarse and simple, their drink, tea and small-beer; costing not above 1s. or 1s. 6d. and their back conveyance about 2s. or 2s. 6d.; so that their net gains are about 5s. per day, which, in the strawberry season, of forty days, amounts to 10l. After this period the same women find employment in gathering and marketing vegetables, at lower wages, for other sixty days, netting about 5l. more. With this poor pittance they return to their native county, and it adds either to their humble comforts, or creates a small dowry towards a rustic establishment for life. Can a more interesting picture be drawn of virtuous exertion? Why have our poets failed to colour and finish it? More virtue never existed in their favourite shepherdesses than in these Welsh and Shropshire girls! For beauty, symmetry, and complexion, they are not inferior to the nymphs of Arcadia, and they far outvie the pallid specimens of Circassia! Their morals too are exemplary; and they often perform this labour to support aged parents, or to keep their own children from the workhouse! In keen suffering, they endure all that the imagination of a poet could desire; they live hard, they sleep on straw in hovels and barns, and they often burst an artery, or drop down dead from the effect of heat and over-exertion! Yet, such is the state of one portion of our female population, at a time when we are calling ourselves the most polished nation on earth.

COLEBROOK-DALE IRON-WORKS—THE REYNOLDS'

(To the Editor of the Mirror.)

In the interesting extract you have given in your excellent Miscellany (No. 321) from Bakewell's Introduction to Geology, when speaking of the exhausted or impoverished state of the iron-ore and coals in Shropshire, &c., an allusion is made in a note to that truly excellent man, the late Mr. Richard Reynolds, and to the final extinction of the furnaces at Colebrook-Dale, which is not altogether correct.

I beg leave, therefore, to point out the errors to you, and to add a fact or two more relating to that distinguished philanthropist and his family, which, perhaps, will not be unacceptable to many of your readers.

Mr. Reynolds was by no means the original, nor, I believe, ever the sole proprietor, of the iron-works in Colebrook-Dale, as stated by Mr. Bakewell; he derived his right in them from his wife's family the Darbies; and the firm of "Darby and Company" was the well known mark on the iron from these works for a very long period; more recently, that of "Colebrook-Dale Company" was adopted.

The Darbies were an old and respectable family of the Society of Friends, and a pair of the elder branches of it were the original "Darby and Joan," whose names are so well known throughout the whole kingdom. I had this anecdote from one of the sons of Mr. Reynolds,⁷ and have no doubt of its authenticity.

It may not be generally known to your readers, perhaps, that the first iron bridge in England was projected at, and cast from, the furnaces of Colebrook-Dale, and erected over the Severn, near that place, about the year 1779; and, considering it to be the first bridge of the kind, I feel little hesitation in stating it to be, even now, the most beautiful one. This structure, at that time thought to be a wonderful attempt, was the entire offspring of Mr. Reynolds' genius; it was planned, cast, and erected, under his immediate care and superintendance.

I cannot suppose the reason given by your author for the discontinuance of the works at Colebrook-Dale to be correct, as there is another large furnace in the immediate neighbourhood, called "Madeley Wood Furnace" (also belonging to Mr. Reynolds's family), which was allowed to make, and, I believe, still makes, the best iron and steel in the United Kingdom. Mr. Reynolds had also other great iron-works at Ketley, since carried on by his two sons, William and Joseph, and still in high reputation, as to the quality of the iron made there; these are not more distant from Colebrook-Dale than six or seven miles, and between the two there are the extensive and highly valuable works of "Old Park," &c., belonging to Mr. Botfield (so that the whole district abounds in the materials), which not having the advantage of the immediate vicinity of the Severn for conveyance, would have been more likely to have stopped from the circumstances stated in your extract; viz. the failure in quality or quantity of iron-stone, coals, or other necessary matter. The Colebrook-Dale fires must, therefore, I conceive, have ceased to blaze, and the blast of her furnaces to roar, from some other cause, and from some private reason of her late proprietors.

Your constant reader,

Shrewsbury. SALOPIENSIS.

NOTES OF A READER

TRAGEDY

We do not see any necessary and natural connexion between death and the end of the third volume of a novel, or the conclusion of the fifth act of a play,—though that connexion in some modern novels, and in most English tragedies, seems to be assumed. Nor does it seem to follow, that, because death is the object of universal dread and aversion, and because terror is one of the objects of tragedy, death must, therefore, necessarily be represented; and not only so, but the more deaths the better. If it be true that familiarity has a tendency to create indifference, if not contempt, it must be considered prudent to have recourse to this strong exhibition as to drastic remedies in medicine, with caution and discrimination, and with a view to the continuance of its effect. We cannot help wishing that our own Shakspeare, who lays down such excellent rules for the guidance of actors, and cautions them so earnestly against "overstepping the modesty of nature," and the danger of "tearing passion to rags," had remembered, that the poet himself has certain limits imposed upon him, which he cannot transgress with impunity. We should not then have observed, in the perusal of some of his plays, the marginal notice of ["dies"] with about as much emotion as a note of exclamation; nor, when at the actual representation, we behold the few remaining persons of the drama scarcely able to cross the stage without stumbling over the bodies of their fallen companions, should we have felt our thoughts unavoidably wandering from the higher business and moral effect of the scene, to the mere physical and repelling images of fleshly mortality.—Edinburgh Rev.

The inquiries of the committee appointed to devise means for the suppression of mendicity, leave us no reason to doubt that in an average of cases a London beggar made by "his trade" eighteen-pence per day, or twenty-seven pounds per annum!

One-ninth of the whole population of Paris are wholly maintained by funds which the different bureaux of charity distribute for their relief; and still a countless horde of mendicants infest her streets, her quays, and all her public places.

Science and literature are "the nourishment of youth, the delight of age, the ornaments of prosperous life, the refuge and consolation of adversity, the companions of our weary travels, of our rural solitudes, of our sleepless nights."

The following quotation from Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary points out the frugal and temperate Scot; and, in illustration, may be contrasted with the proverbial invitation of the better feeding English, "Will you come and take your mutton with me?"

"KAIL, used metonimically for the whole dinner; as constituting among our temperate ancestors the principal part, s.

"Hence, in giving a friendly invitation to dinner, it is common to say, 'Will you come and tak your kail wi' me?' This, as a learned friend observes, resembles the French invitation, Voulez vous venir manger la soupe chez moi!"

THE RIVER NILE.

Ledyard, in his Travels, speaks thus contemptuously of this celebrated wonder:—"This is the mighty, the sovereign of rivers—the vast Nile that has been metamorphosed into one of the wonders of the world! Let me be careful how I read, and, above all, how I read ancient history. You have heard, and read too, much of its inundations. If the thousands of large and small canals from it, and the thousands of men and machines employed to transfer, by artificial means, the water of the Nile to the meadows on its banks—if this be the inundation that is meant, it is true; any other is false; it is not an inundating river."

The Jewish children to this day celebrate the fall and death of Haman, and on that anniversary represent the blows which they would fain deal on his scull, by striking with envenomed fury on the floor with wooden hammers. This observance was but very lately forbidden in the Grand Duchy of Baden.

TRAVELLING FOLLIES

"Many gentlemen," says an old English author, "coming to their lands sooner than to their wits, adventure themselves to see the fashion of other countries; whence they see the world, as Adam had knowledge of good and evil, with the loss or lessening of their estate in this English Paradise; and bring home a few smattering terms, flattering garbs, apish carriages, foppish fancies, foolish guises and disguises, the vanities of neighbour nations."

The Spaniards are infinitely more careful than the French, and other nations, in planting trees, and in taking care of them; for it rarely happens, when a Spaniard eats fruit in a wood or in the open country, that he does not set the stones or the pips; and thus in the whole of their country an infinite number of fruit-trees of all kinds are found; whereas, in the French quarters you meet with none—Labat.

PAINTING

It is painful to think how soon the paintings of Raphael, and Titian, and Correggio, and other illustrious men will perish and pass away. "How long," said Napoleon to David, "will a picture last?" "About four or five hundred years!—a fine immortality!" The poet multiplies his works by means of a cheap material—and Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, and Tasso, and Moliere, and Milton, and Shakspeare, may bid oblivion defiance; the sculptor impresses his conceptions on metal or on marble, and expects to survive the wreck of nations and the wrongs of time; but the painter commits to perishable cloth or wood the visions of his fancy, and dies in the certain assurance that the life of his works will be but short in the land they adorn.—For. Rev.

A Chinese novelist, in describing his hero, says, "the air of the mountains and rivers had formed his body; his mind, like a rich piece of embroidery, was worthy of his handsome face!" Pity he has not been introduced among our "fashionable novels."

PHRENOLOGY

In 1805, Dr. Gall, the celebrated phrenologist, visited the prison of Berlin in the course of his experimental travels to establish his theories. On April 17, in the presence of many witnesses, he was shown upwards of two hundred culprits, of whom he had never heard till that moment, and to whose crimes and dispositions he was a total stranger. Dr. Gall immediately pointed out, as a general feature in one of the wards, an extraordinary development in the region of the head where the organ of theft is situated, and in fact every prisoner there was a thief. Some children, also detained for theft, were then shown to him; and in them, too, the same organ was very prominent. In two of them particularly it was excessively large; and the prison-registers confirmed his opinion that these two were most incorrigible. In another room, where the women were kept apart, he distinguished one drest exactly like the others, occupied like them, and differing in no one thing but in the form of her head. "For what reason is this woman here," asked Gall, "for her head announces no propensity to theft?" The answer was, "She is the inspectress of this room." One prisoner had the organs of benevolence and of religion as strongly developed as those of theft and cunning; and his boast was, that he never had committed an act of violence, and that it was repugnant to his feelings to rob a church. In a man named Fritze, detained for the murder of his wife, though his crime was not proved, the organs of cunning and firmness were fully developed; and it was by these that he had eluded conviction. In Maschke, he found the organ of the mechanical arts, together with a head very well organized in many respects; and his crime was coining. In Troppe he saw the same organ. This man was a shoemaker, who, without instruction, made clocks and watches, to gain a livelihood in his confinement. On a nearer inspection, the organ of imitation was found to be large. "If this man had ever been near a theatre," said Gall, "he would in all probability have turned actor." Troppe, astonished at the accuracy of this sentence, confessed that he had joined a company of strolling players for six months. His crime, too, was having personated a police-officer, to extort money. The organs of circumspection, prurience, foresight, were sadly deficient in Heisig, who, in a drunken fit, had stabbed his best friend. In some prisoners he found the organ of language, in others of colour, in others of mathematics; and his opinion in no single instance failed to be confirmed by the known talents and dispositions of the individual.—For. Q. Rev.